It’s not too late for the president to rethink his arbitrary end date

The American presence is ending but the war in Afghanistan continues with the Afghan government’s forces taking casualties that “cannot be sustained, according to a top officer within the international coalition.”

The scheduled date for an American pullout in Afghanistan grows closer and so do worries that it may be premature; that the troops we have trained and will be leaving behind to carry on may not be ready, quite yet, to handle the job.

The war in Afghanistan is nearing an end – the American part, at any rate – but there is no letup in the fighting and dying of Afghan soldiers. Time, quoting from a Wall Street Journal story, reports that:

Lost in the excitement over ISIS, the battle for Khobani, and the possible threat to Baghdad is news of the nation’s longest war, the one in Afghanistan, which the President once called a “war of necessity.”

With the announcement in Kabul of a power-sharing government between the two presidential candidates, Ashraf Ghani and Abdullah Abdullah, the Afghan election comes closer to a resolution. What is missing, however, is an actual result. The “national unity government” was one part of a deal brokered by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry back in July, when preliminary official results gave Ghani a massive victory, and Abdullah threatened to pull out of the process, claiming massive fraud had taken place. After two months of an audit overseen by the UN, when every ballot box was re-examined—something unprecedented in electoral history—a final result was reached. The result was given last week in secret to the candidates, but not to the public.

President Obama addressed troops at MacDill Air Force Base in Florida on Wednesday regarding his strategy to "degrade and destroy ISIL," but also reminded the audience about his plans for the U.S. military in Afghanistan [emphasis added]:

Barack Obama’s foreign policy is in shambles. He had a dream, expressed in Cairo, of “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world,” of “a world where extremists no longer threaten our people.” So he got out of Iraq and failed to follow through in Libya, seeing no need for American boots on the ground in such a brave new world. He wanted to reset relations with Russia, expecting reciprocal behavior from Vladimir Putin. He indulged the hope that talking about a pivot to Asia would make it so.